Semmes residents seek hundreds of thousands of dollars from utility over stinky water

"Putting chlorine on this nasty water is like putting lipstick on a pig." -- attorney Rick Courtney.

MOBILE, Alabama – Attorneys for a group of Semmes residents today asked a jury to order a utility company to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for foul water that the plaintiffs contend caused rashes and ruined the value of their homes.

In closing arguments, attorney Rick Courtney went over days of testimony from his clients, who said they complained to South Alabama Utilities but got no relief. At the time, he said, they did not realize that their drinking water was contaminated with methane, oil, grease and other dangerous chemicals.

Courtney asked for the reimbursement of water bills that the plaintiffs paid during the years they lived in their homes to compensate for bottled water and ice they were forced to buy. He suggested varying amounts of compensation for rashes that some of them developed. The suggested amounts ranged from $40,000 to $100,000, depending on the severity of the rashes.

And he asked for $75,000 to $80,000 for the lost value of the homes, plus up to $250,000 for mental anguish and pain and suffering.

“It’s worrying about your water. It’s worrying about your health. It’s worrying about the value of your home,” he said. “It’s all of that.”

Attorneys for the utility said the water is perfectly safe and pointed to repeated testing by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and others as proof.

“Where is the water sample? Where is the jug of water that they can pass around and show you that it’s contaminated?” defense lawyer Thomas Galloway asked during his summation. “Our water is not a problem.”

The plaintiffs sued in 2010. The case focused on eight households and 13 people in the Viking Place subdivision off of Snow Road. The residents began moving into the new homes in 2006 and 2007 and immediately encountered water that was undrinkable, according to testimony.

Courtney pointed to testimony from utility officials who acknowledged that they were aware of the problem as far back as 2004 and responded by putting chlorine into the water to kill the foul smell.

“Putting chlorine on this nasty water is like putting lipstick on a pig,” he said.

In one case, Courtney told the jury, the contaminated water contributed to the breakup of a family. Shaun Goolsby, a forester for the Mobile County school system, testified that his wife and baby moved out of the house after a year of watching the infant develop rashes. Their separation led to divorce.

“Once the baby moved to an apartment out on Cottage Hill Road, the rashes went away,” Courtney said. “Imagine that.”

Courtney reminded jurors that the utility’s own tests of water from the houses and the well, itself, indicated oil and grease in the water at a concentration of 3 parts per million. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management do not have a standard related to those substances, but Courtney noted that it is 310 times the maximum allowable concentration in Europe.

Courtney said the tests also showed that the water also that hydrogen sulfide – which is what made it smell bad – and methane, which he said explains how residents at a neighborhood meeting were able to set the water on fire.

Defense lawyer Andy Rutens pointed to multiple tests of some 107 foreign substances and all passed state and federal safety limits.

“The water was tested, and it was reviewed,” he said.

Substances detected in the water were well within safety thresholds, Rutens said. That goes for the supposed oil and grease contamination, he said. He noted that ADEM tested water from all three wells in the affected area.

“And it was permitted. It met ADEM standards. And the ADEM standard is the EPA standard,” he said. “We don’t have these standards (that Europe does) because we don’t need them, because we test over 107 things.”

At the trial, the utility’s general manager would not give a direct answer to a question about whether the water was “pure and wholesome.” But defense lawyers introduced sworn testimony of a utility official before the trial saying that oil and grease is not something any family would want in its water.

“Don’t you think if there was something wrong with our water, you would have everybody in that subdivision complaining about it?” he said.

Sid Jackson, an attorney for the plaintiffs, took offense to that comment and urged the jury to reject the “cockamamie stories” of the utility’s lawyers.

“In a very subtle way, he’s calling my clients liars,” he said. “Enough oil and grease is certainly going to make you sick. … Don’t let them tell you that because they do 107 tests that there’s not another test – the common sense test.”

Jackson asked the jurors to weigh the credibility of his clients based on their backgrounds. The group includes a teacher, a banker, a CSX employee, an associate pastor and a longtime Methodist minister, he said.

Courtney asked the jury to consider that many of his clients are stuck in homes they cannot sell. He also noted that the testimony from the utility was that it could not or would not correct the problem.

“This is a permanent nuisance,” he said. “They’re going to have to live with this stuff. That’s obvious.”